PUBLICATIONS
“No news is good news”— right?
Written by David Brett
During client review meetings with senior stakeholders, I’ve often heard it said that when it comes to translation quality, “no news is good news.” In other words, if complaints about quality haven’t made their way up the chain of command, then the client must be happy. Great, all good. Job done.
Why, then, would we consider introducing another step to the process that could potentially highlight shortcomings that the client didn’t know existed in the first place? You could easily be forgiven for not doing so, but what if your mission is focused on helping clients to make smarter decisions? Just because there hasn’t been an issue worth escalating, or a complaint made, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for continuous improvement strategies to be put in place.
Taking a longer-term strategic view will surely lead to stronger, “stickier” partnerships, which means it will be easier to smooth things over with clients when rare quality issues do emerge. Clients are reassured when they know you’ve taken every possible step to measure and guarantee a high level of quality, rather than just expecting it. It’s always better to be proactive in forging true partnerships by establishing open and honest dialogue with clients, where both sides agree to challenge the norm in pursuit of continuous improvement and high-quality deliverables.
Introducing an additional linguistic quality assurance (LQA) step to the process, ideally in advance of delivery if deadlines allow, but post-delivery if not, serves a valuable purpose. A structured LQA framework provides customers with an objective, consistent, metric-driven approach to quality assessment. Ideally this framework should assess translation output in three key areas:
Analytics: An assessment of the number of translation errors (mistranslations, omissions, untranslated content, grammar issues, inconsistencies, punctuation and spelling errors, terminology problems, etc.) based on the weighted severity of the errors and the word count of the evaluated sample.
Adequacy: A review of how well, as a whole, the translation conveys the same meaning in the target language as in the source language.
Fluency: An assessment of how well the translation reads: does it flow as if it was written in the target language? Or does it sound like a literal translation of a source text?
The quality/suitability score for these three aspects are combined to provide a weighted overall quality score and assessment against the required expectations, resulting in a pass or fail. LQA scores are captured and plotted over time to highlight continuous improvement, something that is vital for any savvy translation buyer these days. This process also enables clients to demonstrate a tangible return on their investment of time and budget in translation.
These average scores can form part of the client/LSP key performance indicators, giving the LSP the ability to demonstrate consistent quality over a sustained period of time, and helping to protect against knee-jerk reactions where clients threaten to pull their business based on a potential one-off issue that is significant enough to become “news”. The end result is that we empower our clients and help them to make smarter decisions. And that’s great “news” for everybody.
Find out more about Janus’ LQA capabilities by joining our webinar on December 2. JOIN HERE.
